Trombones Can Laugh

by Lorraine Ray

  “It’s going,” said Moses with a shrug. “I never did hear—what did you think of playing in your first circus?”

  That was probably a lie; I’m sure Gluey told him I’d liked the circus. “Oh, it was a blast. I dug it.”

  “Good, you have a taste for it.” Moses nodded in approval. I noticed he was drinking an orange juice which I suspected was not without a large quantity of alcohol.

  “Definitely fun,” I said, still commenting on the circus. “I didn’t think I would like it as much as I did.”

  “Are you ready for this adventure today?”

  “Oh yeah. I’m stoked.”

  I looked out the window of the bus in time to see a dozen more Shriners stumbling out of the temple with drinks in hand. They boarded the bus and it actually got louder in there, which I would have thought impossible. Guys were screeching and screaming and slapping each other on the back. Then a few more men without drinks came out of the temple, followed by the driver, who closed the luggage compartment where our instruments were and bounded up the steps of the bus. He plopped into his seat and buckled his seat belt.

  I found out that the Shriners liked to sit in sections on the bus, trombones together, percussionists in one area, clowns in another. Though Gluey was walking around the bus telling Shriners to be seated, the driver had a long wait before he could get going. Finally, everyone found a drink and a place and the bus crept forward. I noticed a truck following us out of the Shriner parking lot. This truck towed two of those dumb miniature cars in a converted trailer. They had lawn mower engines in them and were as obnoxious as all hell to have to listen to, but the kids always seemed to think they were funny.

  We drove through town and out on the highway heading to Crow Flats, a dinky place in the middle of nowhere.

  “How did you get started as a musician anyway?” I asked Moses once we were on the highway.

  “Ah, well, James, my grandfather played the violin and he traveled with Roma musicians in Europe for many years. I heard these stories about his life. My father offered my older brother, Gil, to learn clarinet,” Moses explained, “He learned it and I wanted to do everything that Gil did. So I began to play clarinet, also. And when he joined a Klezmer band—”

  “A what?”

  “Klezmer, you want to know about it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Klezmer, it’s a style. A way of playing, jazzy and fast with violins mostly and wooden blocks and cymbolines. Anyway it was popular in New Haven and I wanted to be in that band also. They didn’t let me at first, but I kept up—”

  “You bugged them a lot?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Moses laughing, “A lot of ‘bugging.’”

  “So eventually they needed another clarinet, which I could play a little, so I joined.”

  “Was it fun?”

  “Oh yes. Very. I stayed out late and acted wild. I went all over the place with that band. We had a lot of adventures. We played for weddings and special events everywhere in New York. I got to travel and go to parties every week. These parties had the best food and good-looking girls. Oh boy, I liked it all right. What could be better?”

  “I guess I could dig a bunch of good food. And pretty girls.”

  “Exactly. Then I liked jazz so I also tried learning a trombone. We added that to the band for the glissando. Another fellow came in for clarinet.”

  “Then why not play that now? Play in those bands that do Klezmer?”

  “I still do sometimes, but when I got older I wanted to do something good for children. And when I had a car repair shop I became a Mason and went through all the levels to be a Shriner.”

  “I see”

  “What nationality are you, James?”

  “English and Pennsylvania Dutch, or something. I don’t know what that is. ‘Ach, don’t be so shusneck!’”

  “What was that? What just happened?” Moses spun around in his seat as though someone else had just spoken. He looked confused and beat his head as though he were attacked by devils, “What was that? Who spoke?”

  I had to stop laughing at him before I could answer. “That means ‘Oh, don’t be so difficult,’ so high handed, or something.”

  “That’s Pennsylvania Dutch?”

  “Yeah. It’s the only thing I know how to say. It’s like German or something.”

  “Good. I’m glad you can’t say anything else. That was very strange. Don’t do it again.”

  “Okay.” I was laughing so hard my side was aching.

  “Yes. A young person is better when they don’t know too much about their nationality. Or about others. It’s better if they keep an open mind. That way they make friends with everyone and see others as their friends.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, still laughing at him.

  “Yeah, I liked Klezmer, but I like any Freilech music.”

  “What’s that--Freilech?”

  “It means happy music. And I like to clown around.”

  “But you said you don’t like the Shriner clowns?”

  “No, they aren’t even happy. One or two of them I have spoken to, that’s all, in all these years. Clowns in general have a very interesting history and the good clown acts follow in classic patterns.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. What you’re gonna see in good clown performances are three characters. There’s the White Face who is dignified and he orders around the other clowns. And then there’s an Auguste who has trouble or he’s an anarchist. Then they add the Contr-auguste and he tries to mediate between the White Face and Auguste.”

  “Kinda like an office feud or something?”

  “Very good. That’s the idea.”

  “You think these Shriner clowns aren’t so good?”

  “They are a grumbly bunch, James. Rather foul.”

  Moses was into drinking, as I mentioned. He always had a cocktail going while we were on the bus. Being Russian he liked his vodka, mostly, and took it with milk or orange juice. He took other liquor, too. It just depended on his mood. Sometimes he sent me back with a certain drink in mind and other times he told me to surprise him. He was quite fond of tequila and never objected to scotch. That’s right, I was fetching all his drinks!

  He drew a line at actually drinking on the floats during the parades. I suppose he thought that would be unseemly. None of them drank on the floats, but they drank everywhere else. Holy shit! The bus was completely free and some of the temples in the town we visited were probably set up like regular social drinking clubs, though this is just my idea of them, because I was never allowed inside, but the Shriners came out of the door with new drinks that they didn’t go in with. Right before we left the bus for a float, Moses would take a last swig, one enormous gulp. He never spilled any on himself or me or his instrument. He was a careful, old Russian gentleman.

  So that day, the whole band, except the driver, Gluey and I, had imbibed freely of the open bar as the bus barreled across the busy stretch of Interstate that led to the turnoff. The bartender set himself up at the rear of the bus, in a seat where he had all the booze and mixes in cardboard boxes beside him. He used old packing material to secure the bottles and had ice, plastic glasses and cocktail mixers. The happy crowd reminisced and joked and played tricks on each other as they rolled down the road. The fez of one of the trumpet Miltons, who was sitting in a seat a few rows behind Moses and me, was used as an ashtray by a standing Shriner. Milton I or II smiled happily out the window or into space as ashes filled the depression in his hat.

  “Does alcohol affect your playing?” I asked Moses.

  “Yes, it makes me better. Stronger and steadier,” Moses claimed.

  “Hmmm,” I said.

  The bus swayed on, leaving the Interstate after two hours. The big old thing hardly fit on some of the little roads that led into the back of beyond. I remember boulders and cactuses reaching out, scraping the sides of the bus. I read my Geometry book and I think I fell asleep for a while, because we’d left very early. We always
had to be able to get to the town we were appearing at by noon or so, because the parades would usually start then. Nearly all of the parades that needed the Shriners were in little towns out in the middle of nowhere. Places that were good for gathering desert sand and misfits.

  I don’t remember the way down there, but I know at one point we turned and headed for a shallow red canyon. The grass grew in yellow mounds, big dry clumps. Off the main road, there were only dirt roads and many large ranches. At times the bus slowed to a crawl before we passed through a town. These little places were almost ghost towns with a small number of residents and boarded up saloons and mining crap left to rust in the Arizona sun. The activities of the countryside was now supporting towns which no longer had any mines in them. And there wasn’t much activity in the countryside.

  “These are the played-out places. Sad isn’t it,” said Moses, staring out the bus window, “All their wealth has passed on. To the East Coast, building bridges and millions of miles of copper wires and engine parts. Copper has been driving all the productive places of America. Now these folks are out in the middle of nowhere with nothing left to support them.”

  We passed collections of heavy rusted equipment, the bulk of an ancient America, giant gears and cogs to pull ore out of the rocky soil, ruined sheds where tons and tons of metal was yanked out of the dry earth.

  “Look at the slag everywhere,” said Moses, “like the devil’s toenail clippings.”

  We passed melted masses of useless rock and minerals and red stained boulders bleeding rust. The equipment we saw everywhere was like giant insects, attached to the hide of earth and unwilling to let go, although the mining had long since ended.

  “It’s pretty lonely down here,” Moses said.

  “Yeah, pretty lonely. The little towns are a hopeless pile of crap,” I said. Moses didn’t care about cursing.

  Two small towns we passed through were made up of the saddest collections of houses and the most pathetic ideas of progress you could imagine anywhere. And conservative, damn, there were signs about wanting no hippies. On screen doors, washroom windows, gates and garages.

  I noticed Moses straining to read one of them. A few minutes later he spoke up.

  “I have heard there is a nudist commune of hippies out here somewhere,” he said suddenly with real interest, waving one hand around vaguely in the direction of the window beside me. “They say it’s in a canyon near Mexico somewhere around here and there's almost a hundred people and goats living in it. In Geodesic domes.”

  “What are those? Domes?”

  “Sort of space-age ball-shaped houses. Made of triangular pieces that you fit together. They look a little like igloos or nodules. Like a pimple with window panes.”

  “Wow. You don’t say. And nudists are living in those? Girl nudists?”

  “That’s the rumor.”

  “I might wanna join them,” I said, looking around to get an idea of where we were for future reference. “What’s this place, anyway?”

  “Santa Cruz County. Route 242.”

  “Damn, I gotta remember this.” I had a stubby pencil and jotted that down on the endpapers of the Geometry book.

  “Yes, that might be an educational place for you,” said Moses, chuckling like some crazy imp.

  “Highly. Highly educational,” I agreed. “You don't know the directions? The exact canyon?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, James. Well, I heard it was east of this road and before you get to Naco. But it’s something for you to research.”

  “I’m a little afraid to come down here with my hair, not that it’s that long—”

  Moses agreed. “I don’t think it’s that long.”

  “Thanks, my parents hate it. I think my dad wants to sneak into my room at night and slice it all off! Some of the typical crew cut gang at school kinda look at me peculiarly. They cut their crew cuts flat at the top, so they’re block heads. They always look like they want to shave my head the way they have it.”

  At one point the hillside beside the bus was studded with blooming agaves. “Look at those!” I exclaimed.

  “Like a hill of artichoke plants,” Moses replied, “but they’re agave.”

  “Is this what they make tequila of?”

  “I believe it’s these or a near relative.”

  “Goddamn.”

  “They have whole farms of the stuff in Mexico. In Jalisco.”

  “Really?”

  “Fields as far as you can see.”

  “Have you seen them?”

  “Sure, I visited them once.”

  “I’d like to see that…. Moses, you’re a very well-rounded person,” I said.

  “Thank you for noticing,” Moses agreed.

  Twenty miles from Crow Flat and the hills were smooth and rolled in beautiful wiggling patterns off to the horizon. It looked strange with rounded hills and these sticks poking into the sky from the agave plants scattered here and there. We went on for a few miles admiring these plants until they gradually disappeared.

  When we turned off on the quieter stretches of mountainous road, a paved road which led to the rinky-dink town of Crow Flats, the crowd on the Shriner bus was that much more crocked and rowdy. Then, by chance, a Shriner named Ed, who played the tuba and always sat near the back of the bus with another tuba player, in the seat behind Moses and I, looked out the rear window of the bus at the stretch of highway behind us. Not expecting to see anything other than a rocky ledge that the highway department had sliced with dynamite and some scraggly patches of prickly pear, what he actually saw was a motorcycle with ape bars overtake and nearly cream a small truck.

  “Hey,” said Ed, after what he’d seen behind them had fully sunk in.

  “Huh?” said the other man coming out of a daze and answering with a slushy voice. He had only mixed one Bloody Mary, but he didn’t hold his liquor well, a fact his wife pounded into him every time she picked him up at the temple. “What’s the ma-ma-ter?”

  “There’s a motorcycle and a sidecar doing crazy stuff back there.”

  Because of the rev of the engine of the bus going up the hill, he only heard some of the other man’s words. “What stuff?”

  “Just crazy stuff. It roared up and about killed somebody in a truck,” he explained. “Back there at the rocky ledge.”

  Moses and I and some of the other Shriners overheard him and looked back to the spot where he pointed. I could barely see a motorcycle, a sidecar and hairy men. They looked like a couple of cartoon apes!

  A small blue truck had pulled off the road and puffs of tan dust were floating away from the wheels of the truck as though it had been an emergency stop.

  “It overtook the truck in a crazy way. The truck almost crashed. It’s at the side of the road right now. Way back there,” Ed explained and pointed.

  “No kidding,” said Milton II across the aisle. He held aloft a greenish highball in a plastic cocktail glass and it sloshed violently as the bus barreled upward. ‘Madness, simply madness the way some people drive.’

  “It’s gaining on us,” said Gluey. Gluey was usually the most alert of all the Shriners, because, as I said, besides me and the driver, he was sober.

  “Hey, driver,” called the director for the day, who had gotten word of what had happened. “Hey!”

  There was no response from the driver.

  “Tell the driver there is a crazy motorbike coming up behind us,” the director told someone further up the aisle.

  “What’s that?” asked an excited man in an oversized shirt. “A crazy motorcyclist? You know what that means!”

  A couple of the other old men turned around and stuck their heads over the top of their seats.

  “Good God, those nutty Bastards are heading straight for us,” said another when he had taken a look. “They’re gonna overtake us in a few minutes.”

  “It’s a foreign motorcycle. I think it’s a—”

  “What?”

  “I believe it’s a Morton ffuggles-wort
h Sapphire,” said a drunken man who kept mashing his fez on his head with one hand as though a sudden wind might blow it off.

  “There’s no such thing,” said Moses, “Are you actually nuts or something?”

  Now it seemed Moses was an expert in English motorcycles!

  “I know my English moto—”

  “Yeah, it’s an English damn thing, sure enough. Whoa, it’s not slowing down a bit,” his pop-eyed seatmate said. “A maniac and a sidecar.”

  “It’ll slow down,” a bored man concluded.

  “Of course it’s not slowing down. I think it happens to be speeding up,” said a know-it-all with a cigar.

  “It’s gaining on us,” screeched Ed, who had seen it first and was starting to hop around the bus with excitement. He had a hard time controlling himself whenever things got exciting.

  “My god, I think it’s two of those Bastard nuts!” said the other tuba player.

  “What, they’re not in this parade, are they?” exclaimed someone sitting ahead of our seat with real alarm.

  “What bastards? What bastards are they talking about?” I asked Moses.

  Moses responded with a start. “Of course! The Bastards! They must be here today!”

  “I think so, Moses. Yeah, they said Bastards might be playing in this parade. What are they talking about?”

  “By Bastards they mean the International Order of Old Bastards, James, also known as the I.O.O.B. I haven’t told you about them yet. The Bastards are a gang of raggedy, smelly, obnoxious, obscene jokers who disrespect all that is honorable and good in the world, James. They're something to behold. A real piece of work. I don’t like them, but they’re awfully funny. Those damned guys are nut cases. If they’re coming, you’re in for a big show and maybe some trouble!”

  “Trouble!?”

  “They make a lot of trouble wherever they appear. They’re a cursed bunch of hopped-up monkeys. We ignore them, but they’re enemies of the Mountain Men. Oh, I hope they’re both in this parade.”

  “Mountain Men?”

  “Another band of kooks.”

  “Is this I.O.O.B. a band? A musical marching group?” I asked.

  “Good god, no, James! How did you get that idea? The Bastards aren’t musicians. I’d venture to say they don’t know what music is! We play real instruments. We’re musicians! The Bastards only know how to smash a bunch of dirty looking drums and toot a couple of sad, dented-up bugles. Those are the worst looking bugles you’ve ever seen, James, a pity to behold,” Moses explained. “They don’t even play instruments other than those, just bugles and drums. They’re Bastards! Their name is what they are, James. Get me another drink! Pronto!”